


Sojourn in the Shadows

by TheKiwiBird



Series: Frosty!verse [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Origin Story, Runaway angel, Trickster Gabriel, wild mass guessing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-07
Updated: 2013-06-07
Packaged: 2017-12-14 05:36:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/833359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheKiwiBird/pseuds/TheKiwiBird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A runaway archangel searches for a way to abandon the life that brought him great sorrow, and when he did, he didn't bother to read the fine print. Set from pre-series to post-Hammer of the Gods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. To the Edge of Twilight

Once upon a time a depressed little archangel descended from heaven, torn apart by the endless nightmare of watching his dearest brothers and sisters fight over the smallest things. He had run away from the madness, hoping to never be found and brought home. He did his best to hide himself from them; he took a strange and foreign vessel to live within, he hid amongst the northern pagan gods, and even partook in their blasphemous traditions.

But somehow it was not enough. He still maintained that mighty Grace of his, and simple parlor tricks with it would not suffice. No, he needed something greater. So he sought out dark and forbidden powers, great shadows to swallow his Grace and hide it from the world to ensure they would never find him. Something that made him feel tied to this new and strange landscape he wanted to call home. He found great magic that required little more than a constantly replenishable power source, something that could be instantly jolted to life at the spur of the moment to turn order into chaos. It could make cold hot, illusions reality, day night, fame obscurity, and light darkness. 

He gathered the primal earth energies and swallowed them whole, hoping to hide his Grace, the light that reminded him of the home he had tried so desperately to escape, and he begged the shadows to make the pain disappear. The pain of the memories, the regret in his heart that he could not stop the ones he loved from hurting each other, the Grace that burned so brightly within the flesh he curled himself up into it would never be truly hidden. This world, this little planet, he wanted it to be a new, less painful home, and he begged the swirling chaos he had plunged into him to make it so. The moment it attached itself to his Grace was the moment he regretted it.

The energies first ripped apart the basics: it immersed the archangel's halo in shadow, dimming it into obscurity. It swallowed all six of its beautiful white eagle's wings the archangel bore and diminished them to wings of the crafty raven, staining them in abstract splatterings of brown and gold. It clouded his mind, making the painful memories feel more like cruel nightmares of no consequence. It then infiltrated his mind, telling it to embrace the cruelest part of his nature: to smite the ones he found most wicked and poisonous. To teach them a terrifying lesson they would likely die from. To make grand examples of them as if every last one were publicly executed, no matter how far from civilization they were. The power demanded sacrifice, and foremostly it craved blood. 

The archangel panicked and began to try and sever the bonds of this monstrous chaos magic as it swallowed everything, both the things he no longer wanted and the things he could not live without. His Grace shrieked as its newly acquired power was so hastily plucked away, and once the archangel held the swirling ball of shadowy magic in his hands, he stood dumbfounded, momentarily unsure as to why he did such a thing as remove it.

He looked up at his wings and gasped at their garishness; no more did they appear to be such celestial trappings of great power, but had become the symbols of corruption and unholy sacrilege. But they felt just the same as before, maybe even better, since they were smaller and more compact, better fitting on his vessel. His halo seemed non-existent, but its light always distracted him, like a candle that never snuffed itself out. All those painful dreams, they meant nothing at all in the long run. That big family of terrible winged dickbags who would never darken his little slice of the universe meant nothing. His home was in the frozen tundras, but really? The great powers in his hands gave him the chance to go anywhere, do anything, and most of all, be free to consume all the decadent things of the world that were around him and were to come.

Without a second thought, the archangel imbued his vessel with the dark magic, its corruptive and chaotic nature soaking into every inch of flesh, imbuing the corrupted creature with its capricious appetite for destruction and decadence. And off it flew into the dark, reborn as a pagan demi-god of tricks and illusion.


	2. From Dusk to Dawn and Into Twilight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was all fun and games until those two showed up...

And for thousands of years, the archangel got his wish: he hid from Heaven and called himself Loki, the Trickster, a name the darkness had blessed him with. As the Trickster, he slaughtered the arrogantly righteous and corrupt with whimsical merriment and exacting precision; he always made sure they got their just desserts, their death by only the greatest of ironies.

The Trickster had his fun and games until the day he tormented Crawford Hall. Even though his tricks were a great success, the humans who had sought to stop his murder-laden caprice struck a chord within the strange pure light that was all but dim and dead inside of him. Their very presence shook off the dust and something reminded him of a bad dream he once had centuries ago, of two brother who loved each other, yet turned on each other in a terrible feud that split the skies in two and only ended when one was buried deep within the fiery bowels of the land.

...It was a dream...wasn't it...?

But he took to them, as they were fairly amazing pranksters themselves, and he couldn't fault them for that. They had even managed to kill his illusory shadow; he was impressed. But still the light beckoned for him to think about them, long after they had left. What was it the light wanted him to think of? He hadn’t a clue; it had sat silently within him for so long, occasionally granting him strange powers, but now it chose to speak...?

He unfurled his brilliant Trickster's wings and flew to wherever the light told him to go. When it drove him to fly to a graveyard in Detroit, he almost thought it wanted him to find the brothers’ ancestors, but no. It was telling him that they themselves would be here someday, bearing the souls of his brothers and destroying the world in the process. He seemed quite confused by this slowly growing light's insinuations, and didn't understand until it dispelled a great fog from his mind. All the monstrously terrifying dreams he had were anything but, and for the second time in his life he begged for the terrors to stop.

But the great Trickster magic he had grown accustomed to could not smother the great light this time. It spoke to the twisted archangel and told him a single thing: those two were the most important thing in the world and he was to try and steer them here whenever they got too far away from it. There would be times when he felt he should intervene, but he would know when he was wrong, and the light promised to tell him. And for a strange reason he trusted it, because it was implicitly a part of him, wasn't it?

...As much as he wished to finish them off as they were running scared and vulnerable, the light told him otherwise. It told him to hide, something it did not enjoy to speak kindly of doing. And he waited, and continued his wrath-filled warpath of pure hilarious irony. He waited some more, until he found himself somewhere down in Florida with a goal in mind. And when it didn't work, he lost hope. Was this silly hopeful beacon of power so happy with its results that it would ignore what he rambled on about and its lack of effect? The light told him it was all about making an impact. They wanted to find him now, even if he did nothing to affect their actions. He disliked its optimism; he preferred the shadow of obscurity instead of sticking his neck out. But the light still pressed on, making him rely on it more than his natural abilities of illusion bending.

When he went on a mini rampage in Ohio a few years later, they were all over him and his antics. But the light guided him along, and the corrupted, but not lost, archangel knew exactly what he had to do. It was the most sure thing he had in his mind since the day he reached out for the great primal energies that had once so greatly tried to swallow the light -his Grace, he realized- whole. When they figured him out, he had to give the truth to them. But to abandon the safe haven he had been for thousands of years, even if it was as much of an illusion as the magic itself, was difficult at best. But he did not regret it, even when every sealed memory and emotion came flooding through at once.

And when that arrogant older brother threw everything back at him, the pain seemed far less than it should have. But he was right, after all. And when it came time to face one of the greatest of all the monsters from his long-feared memories, the brother he loved so much that he could not stand to see him suffer, all his desires to run melted away. Not this time would he leave to evade the madness. He could not will himself, through light or shadow, to abandon the humans he knew were genuinely okay for the most part. He had spared so many in the years, after all, because they were innocent. He may have focused on erasing the wicked, but he had a strange habit of running into the good ones.

Even if his dear brother could not see with his charred and blackened light, he would try with his own tainted light to save him from his own misguidance. And try he did; he was certain that a flicker of something caught his attention, but in retrospect he doubted anything had penetrated his brother's thick skull. So he decided to pull the grandest trick: escape by extreme possuming. And lo and behold, it worked...but at a great price.

The Trickster awoke to a startling scene; surrounded by the corpses of his fellow pagan gods, he could not recall why he was gouged with such a lovely looking sword. Whatever its purpose, it clearly wasn't something meant to kill him. He queried the tiny light buried in his great power; perhaps it would know what had happened. But it did not speak this time; its loud and commanding voice silent. For a moment he was terrified, but surely there was a reason.

...It didn’t seem to matter, really. He’d find out from somebody later. He laughed softly to himself, and kept the strange sword as a trophy. Maybe its purpose, and perhaps its owner, would come back someday. With a quick snap, his injuries disappeared, and upon his raven wings he flew off into the night. He had a feeling the mirror-like sword was going to come in handy on his next hunt.


End file.
